26 July 2000

Color Basics

To specify colors in Web pages, you can refer to the predefined
set of colors by name. For more control, though, you have to
use a six-digit hexadecimal code, specifying the mix of red,
green, and blue (RGB) in each color. (Here's a handy hex-to-decimal
conversion chart, if ever you need one.)

Think of each color code as three sets of two hexadecimal
digits: the first two for red, the second two for green, the last
two for blue. Any of these three can be assigned a value from 00
to FF (hex for 255), meaning you have a theoretical limit of 256
x 256 x 256 colors, or 16.7 million -- more than the human eye
can distinguish. For practical technical reasons (i.e., not all
monitors can show them), it's best to stick to numbers like 00,
11, 22, . . . EE, FF. That still gives you 16 x 16 x
16 colors, or 4096. (It's better still if you stick to 00,
33, 66, 99, CC, and FF.) Some samples:

Code

Sample

#000000

#FF0000

#00FF00

#0000FF

#FFFF00

#FF00FF

#00FFFF

#FFFFFF

Your colors don't all have to be 00 or FF: you can use
different numbers between them to get different shades. The
lower the numbers, the closer to black.

Code

Sample

#FFFFFF

#DDDDDD

#AAAAAA

#888888

#444444

#000000

#0000FF

#0000DD

#0000BB

#000088

#000066

#000044

#000022

#FF8888

#CC8844

#77AA22

Someone has collected a palette
of the 216 most reliable colors to use on Web pages.

You can put the color tags in several places:

<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> (inside the <head>
section of your document) will give you a white background for
your whole page.

<font color="#FF0000"> (anywhere in the document) will
give you red text.

Inside a table, you can put <body bgcolor="#0000FF">
inside a cell to make that cell's background blue.

With other codes inside an anchor, you can change the colors
of links -- but let's hold off on that; it's usually best to
stick with the default blue for links and purple for unfollowed
links.